Click here to Skip to main content
15,886,799 members

Prevent/detect usb flash cloning/restoring

Cosmin D Popescu asked:

Open original thread
Hi there,

I have an issue regarding developing a secure way of doing licensing for a software application. This application would allow the user the possibility to use some how of "offline licenses" for consuming, stored in an encrypted file.
The problem is that the main vulnerability is when the user decides to hack the licensing system, by cloning at first the entire usb flash contents (cloning byte by byte) and after consuming all of it's x licenses, he would restore the clone to the same usb stick and re-consume the same licenses.

So, the question to you would be:
Is there a way to somehow know if a usb flash has been cloned ? Maybe with some sort of specific generic usb flash hardware feature including some counters or something like that?
Or do you have another idea on doing the "offline licenses" mechanism safe (without requiring internet connection and server sync) ?


Thank you !
Tags: Flash, Hardware, Security, USB, Clone

Plain Text
ASM
ASP
ASP.NET
BASIC
BAT
C#
C++
COBOL
CoffeeScript
CSS
Dart
dbase
F#
FORTRAN
HTML
Java
Javascript
Kotlin
Lua
MIDL
MSIL
ObjectiveC
Pascal
PERL
PHP
PowerShell
Python
Razor
Ruby
Scala
Shell
SLN
SQL
Swift
T4
Terminal
TypeScript
VB
VBScript
XML
YAML

Preview



When answering a question please:
  1. Read the question carefully.
  2. Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
  3. If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
  4. Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.
Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.
Please note that all posts will be submitted under the http://www.codeproject.com/info/cpol10.aspx.



CodeProject, 20 Bay Street, 11th Floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5J 2N8 +1 (416) 849-8900